


the landmarks are the same

by singmyheart



Series: the book of love has music in it [4]
Category: Freestyle Love Supreme, Hamilton - Miranda (Broadway Cast) RPF, In the Heights - Miranda (Broadway Cast) RPF
Genre: Beach House, F/M, M/M, Morning Sex, Public Sex, complicated adult emotions, why is that a tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-07
Updated: 2017-03-07
Packaged: 2018-09-30 06:30:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10156232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singmyheart/pseuds/singmyheart
Summary: Lin, who's a tempest in a teacup most of the time, can't really grasp what the opposite is like, but he can respect it. He's spent most of the last five years learning how to do so, how to shoulder part of it when Tommy lets him.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [functionalhuman](https://archiveofourown.org/users/functionalhuman/gifts).



> this is set summer 2007, after the announcement that Heights was going to Broadway.

 

 

Manhattan clears out at the end of summer. Ghost town, everyone gone to try and make something of the last dying gasp of August. Lin's always found it kind of peaceful, relatively speaking.

Bill’s parents have a place in Montauk, so a dozen of them join the exodus, pack up and head east for Labor Day long weekend. The air is different here, salt-laced and clean, absent the sticky claustrophobic hot-garbage smell of the city. The house belongs on a postcard, white shutters, sun-bleached furniture on the front porch. Thirty feet from the beach. _Picturesque_ springs to mind.

The evening has wound down, now, from the rowdy chaos of earlier, the classic kickoff to the weekend. Almost everyone gone to bed, the remains of liquor and weed and pizza boxes scattered through the dining room. In the kitchen - the only light still on, an island in the dark - Lin's wide awake. Probably an extrovert thing. He senses he's about to be the last man standing, but he's content for now to just listen to Tommy and Vanessa talk about - whatever it is they're talking about. Not work; by mutual agreement shop talk has been banned for the next few days. Two of his favourite voices in the world, their cadences comforting even if he lets his attention drift too far to actually register the words.

“Well,” Vanessa says finally, tries unsuccessfully to smother a jaw-cracking yawn with the back of her hand. Plucks Lin's beer from his slack fingers and drains the last of it, wincing a little; he'd cut himself off ages ago and it's long since gone flat. “I'm gonna call it a night.” She twists to kiss him, brief and sweet.

“Night, beautiful.” She smiles at him and the vague sort of nausea/chest pain that always accompanies that sight contorts into a tiny selfish worm of hope when she kisses Tommy too. But it's friendly, quick and maybe kind of awkward and not leading to anything, clearly. She waves, heads off down the hall.

“I'm not gonna be able to sleep,” Tommy says, reading his mind. “Wanna go for a walk?”

It's definitely too cold to be out here in t-shirts, especially after the warmth of the house, but it's kind of nice, bracing. They start off down the beach, just wandering. The waves breaking almost gently, as if not to wake anyone in this line of white-shuttered houses like theirs, that probably contain the detritus of nights like theirs.

“I'm gonna move here,” Lin decides. “Change my name. Become a… lobster… trapper… or something. Shut up,” this to Tommy snickering, “I'll learn the appropriate terminology before I do it.”

“Doesn't sound like you,” Tommy says (rude and uncalled for, in Lin's opinion). “You know that like, ten people live here? What would you even do with yourself if you couldn't wait in lines for hours at a time? You'd never write again.”

“And then we'd both be fucked. Okay, fair point.” Silence for a few minutes and then he can't hold it back anymore, what's been flashing neon in his brain on a constant loop - it all comes out in a rush, sharper than he intends. “What the fuck are we _doing_? God.” Tommy waits him out, that look on his face that he gets whenever Lin says something ridiculous and he knows there's more coming. “This - just - fucking - all of this.”

“Use verbs, Lin.”

"We're going to Broadway.”

“I'd heard rumblings, yes.”

“Ugh. Shut up.”

“Do you need me to tell you that you can do this?”

“Yes.” Lin knows he's being an ass, demanding reassurance when Tommy’s in the trenches with him - and further, that Tommy’s not any better equipped than he is, that they're both flailing here, crashing into something new at every turn. That knowledge doesn't make him need it any less.

“You can do this. I've told you that you can do this, and I've told you that I've told you that you can do this.”

“How are you so sure?”

And of all things Tommy laughs. “I'm not.”

“And if I fuck it up?” He can't help it, the catastrophist thing, that constant hum of anxiety that pings him from one worst-case scenario to another, can't sit still.

“Then you'll fuck it up. Don't get precious about it.”

For all of a second Lin's floored. “Don't get -” he starts, disbelieving, but Tommy winces, hastens to explain.

“No, I just mean - mourn it, however long that takes, and on to the next. There'll always be a next thing. There's always gonna be work.”

“How can you even - how are you so detached? Fuck, Tommy, if -”

“Because I _have_ to be,” Tommy says fiercely; sharp and sudden vehemence of the kind that Lin can't recall having seen from him, like, ever. He pauses, searching for the right words before he goes on, like always. Reining it back in just as quickly as he’d let it loose. “One of us has to be. Do you honestly think I'm not just as absolutely terrified as you are? That it's not gonna break my fucking heart if this - if we don't - Jesus. _Detached,_ fuck you.” He sighs, heavy. They've stopped walking; in the moonlight he looks pale and drawn. “One of us has to maintain an ounce of distance here. Might as well be me.”

“You're right,” Lin admits, after a moment. That's quite the declaration, from Tommy. “Sorry. Fuck.”

“What I'm trying to say,” Tommy says, takes a breath, “is that I have faith in you, asshole. There are a lot of unknowns, here. You're not one of ‘em. If you could try to remember that for more than thirty seconds at a time…”

“Aw,” Lin says, drawing it out some, because he _is_ kind of an asshole. “That's, like. Almost sweet, for you.” Hooks into Tommy’s belt loops and tugs him forward a step; he goes, grudgingly. Tommy’s not taller than him but Lin's aware of shrinking down a little, relaxing, looking up from under his lashes, because he's also kind of a snake and very much angling to get kissed right now. He's hoping the fact that it's the middle of the night and they're definitely alone is enough to offset Tommy’s usual weirdness about public displays of affection (the internal rules he seems to have about this particular thing don't always make sense to Lin - the number of bar bathrooms they've fucked in is only increasing - but whatever. Lin's used to being exceptional and he's not about to question a good thing).

Tommy does kiss him, knows exactly what he's doing and gets a little bit of his own back. Tongue and teeth and a hand in Lin's hair, which isn't quite long enough to pull, but the suggestion is there.

“You love me,” Lin murmurs once Tommy lets him breathe again and maybe it's just his stupid mouth getting the better of him yet again - cousin to the reckless desire to push, that white-hot thing that makes him ask to be hit and hurt, bare his throat for a hand - but he doesn't think so.

“You're a prick,” Tommy grumbles, muffled, into his jaw. It's not a no, and he _knows_ it's not ‘cause this feeling, he can name: it's all the profound satisfaction of finishing the hat, of the lightning bolt of inspiration bottled and wrestled down into something tangible. The surety that all his pieces fit. This feeling, he knows better than almost anything.

In counterpoint to this he can feel Tommy closing off, retreating back into his head, wherever he goes to flagellate himself for daring to loosen his customary white-knuckled grip on his feelings. Lin can practically hear a gate slamming shut even as Tommy’s letting it get heavy, teeth on his neck. He's trying to push Lin's buttons and distract him, is what he's doing. “Hey,” Lin says, unpeeling Tommy from his neck to look him in the eye. “We good? You good?”

“Fine,” Tommy says and draws his thumb across Lin's lip, gentle. Kisses him again so he doesn't have a chance to argue. He's all tension, though, and beneath the usual exasperation Lin's heart cracks for him, Tommy who keeps everything under lock and key, always. Lin, who's a tempest in a teacup most of the time, can't really grasp what the opposite is like, but he can respect it. He's spent most of the last five years learning how to do so, how to shoulder part of it when Tommy lets him. Tommy’s the only person Lin's ever met who gets the kind of shit out of him that he does - and he knows it's mutual; Tommy's admitted as much, in his own frustrating roundabout Tommy kind of way.

“Not here,” Lin protests, quiet and token, when Tommy starts walking him back, toward one of the splintery picnic tables scattered in groups of two and three along the shore. Mostly just to test how far Tommy’s gonna push. They're in front of a restaurant, tiny mom-and-pop fish and chips joint, and the effect at this hour is almost eerie: blinds down, hand-lettered sign on the door cast in blue and black.  _Sorry, We're Closed._

“Yes, here,” he says, kind of into Lin's mouth. Tension tension tension and all Lin wants is to snap the wire so he pushes back, as usual, manages to nudge Tommy down onto one of the benches, weathered wood creaking. “Lin -”

Lin cuts him off with a kiss, bruising, trying to convey _relax_ in the roll of his jaw. Tommy reaches for him still and Lin grabs his wrists, both of them, squeezes just lightly. Tommy lets go of his shirt, message received, but he's still not quite on board, not as much as he should be. “Hey,” Lin says, soft. “Will you just - can you just be here? Shut your head up a minute? Yeah?” Tommy laughs a little, like, _pot, kettle._ Doesn't stop Lin dropping to his knees.

It's maybe not the best blow job he's ever given in his life, technique-wise, but he doesn't think that matters. It had rained earlier and the sand under his knees is cold, damp. Sand in his sneakers too - fucking everywhere, actually. Familiar and foreign at once, warm heavy weight of cock on his tongue, Tommy mostly quiet but for the odd sigh, the vague concerned noise when Lin has to take a second to fight the choke. He's fine, though, and in all the chaos of his life he still has this, this and the certainty that it's what he's good at, good for. Warm mouth and the insistent desire to please, to impress. Tommy who knows how to get at everyone's best and is so stubbornly afraid of letting someone take care of him. Waves crashing steady behind them and the warning, firm tug on his hair and his name slips from Tommy's mouth like a curse. Shaking as he comes, harder than his reserve would seem to allow, and Lin's got a mouthful of salt-warmth and sweat pricking the back of his neck, his palms. Spits into the sand and scuffs at it with the toe of his shoe when he gets back on his feet.

Tommy pulls him into a kiss immediately, still panting. Still thrumming, too, the wire not broken but maybe loosened, maybe frayed a little. Reaches for him but he's not more than half-hard, abruptly exhausted. “Don't worry about me,” he says, catches Tommy’s mouth again so he knows he's not being curved.

“You sure?” Tommy asks and Lin realizes he's doing it again, the telepathy thing. But if he's learned anything these last few years it's that even they have to talk, sometimes.

(That first meeting, five years ago, five lifetimes ago, and the _click._ Business turned into dinner and the conversation ran on into hour six and hasn't stopped yet. That, Lin thinks, is the crux of their whole messy constant thing: how they can keep talking and not talking at once, how utterly sure of each other they are except when they're not.)

“Yeah. S’fine. You can owe me one.”

“And you're not gonna let me forget, I imagine.” Just the suggestion of a smile.

They walk back to the house in silence. Waves crashing, wire tension. “You ever worry that we're, like. Codependent,” Lin says, in the hall.

Tommy leans on the doorframe of the room he's sharing with Shock and Bill, considers. “Yeah.”

“Good, me neither.” Lin kisses him one last time, light and chaste, and they go their separate ways for the night. He considers taking a quick shower just to rid himself of the sand, but he doesn't want to wake anyone and, more to the point, he really is fucking tired.

So he strips to his boxers and crawls into bed next to Vanessa cautiously, trying not to wake her. She stirs anyway, curls around him, half-asleep. Eventually, with her hair tickling his nose and her leg thrown over his, he drifts down.

He wakes with the grit of sand between his teeth, sticking to his back. Ugh. Vanessa’s awake already, of course she is. Skin tawny in the sunlight, black-frame glasses on, intent on some trashy drugstore paperback. “If it isn't the loveliest girl in the place,” he sings hoarsely and she smiles without looking up. Reaches to skritch her nails through the hair at the nape of his neck; wrinkles her nose a little in distaste (adorably) and brushes the sand off her fingertips onto the carpet.

“I see you brought half the beach back with you,” she says, idly. “How was the rest of your night?”

“Was good, I think,” and she arches one perfect brow at him over the top of her book. “That's not what I meant. Although, in the interest of -”

“Hush,” she says, pulls him up to kiss him.

“Good morning to you, too,” he says and she laughs, tosses the book aside. They roll around for a while, easy, and though he's faintly stressed at the possibility of being interrupted it's not really going to stop him (they're sharing the room with Anthony and Karen, who were both passed out on the living room floor last he saw them, anyway). The perfect slick heat of her cunt is enough to drive everything else out for a while, the familiar weight of her body on his. Sweat building up, her nails in his chest just to bite and he whines a little into the wild curtain of her hair when she leans down to kiss him.

“Touch me,” she demands quietly when she's close and he doesn't need telling twice - she could keep him on a leash, bat her lashes and he'd drop to his knees. She pushes into his fingers on her clit and comes, stifles that sweet sharp moan in his shoulder, skin and cotton shirt caught between her teeth. He lets himself follow her over a minute later, awash in the sunlight here at the edge of New York and the end of summertime. She rolls off of him giggling, stretches out on her side and props her chin in her hand. “Oof. That was. Yeah.”

“It was,” he agrees, and then, just because it's true and he feels like saying it, “I adore you.”

“Eh, you're alright,” she says, deadpan, so reminiscent of Tommy that it sneaks up on him in a second.  Maybe it's a dick move, unfair of him to compare them, but it's there - both of them all head where he's all heart, although Vanessa is infinitely less weird about it. Less completely terrified of betraying that she's capable of human feelings. Her brain scares him a little, the way she can look at numbers and not have to force them into cohesion, her intellect of a different tenor than his own or Lac’s or Bill’s, the people he's surrounded himself with to build a life and career, people whose genius he understands and can work with. She's got steel where he's got softness and she slows him down, makes him focus. Fixed point. She owns like ten pairs of identical grey sweatpants and isn't too vain for glasses like he is, and sometimes when she's sitting at the kitchen table in the mornings doing the _Times_ crossword, chewing absently on the end of her pen, Lin catches himself thinking ridiculous things like that he's waited his whole life for someone to make him feel like chewing on pens is cute.

“You have heart-eyes face on,” she observes. “Did I do something adorable?”

“Always.”

“Nerd.” She blows her hair out of her eyes and starts hunting around for her panties, discarded in the depths of the bed somewhere.

Breakfast is quiet, almost everyone looking green. Shock, it turns out, is a hell of a cook, and goes all out on the morning-after staples: pancakes, French toast, bacon, the whole nine. The kitchen looks like a war zone afterward. Entirely too many people volunteer to do the dishes, feeling guilty over not helping to cook; the result is chaos of the usual fashion, all of them talking over each other. Somewhere in there, Anthony and Utkarsh start trading twos with the intent that the first to fuck up, as determined by popular vote, has to wash.

“I hate all of you,” Karen declares around the same time Shock drops a beat. She's draped pathetically over Vanessa’s lap and says it kind of facedown into the table, though, so it goes mostly unnoticed. Probably pissed that she's in the worst shape out of everyone this morning, by a long shot.

Lin's hanging back for once, nursing his coffee, which is strong enough to give even him mild heart palpitations care of Shock’s tendency to forget that normal humans don't share his frankly terrifying caffeine tolerance. Tommy, inveterate shit-disturber, has started throwing out random words in an attempt to put an end to things or trip them up, whichever comes first. The rhymes are getting more ridiculous the longer they go on and finally after a run that includes _Grapes of Wrath,_ polymath, birdbath, Sylvia Plath, Anthony drops the ball. Lin's surprised he'd held up this long and when he says so Anthony calls him an asshole, and gets showered in toast scraps and crumpled-up napkins by everyone else as a result.

Anthony shoos all of them out - "go on, you fucking animals, get outta here" (save Utkarsh, who's looking smug and likely will for at least the next hour). They disperse, to go shower, linger over the last cold remains of breakfast, take a walk. Curse an uncaring god, in Karen's case, probably.

Lin and his coffee end up on the front porch, just watching the water. Tommy joins him before long, elbows on the railing. Quiet. Close enough to touch so Lin does, just tips over to rest his head on Tommy’s shoulder; Tommy lets out a discontented sort of noise into his hair but doesn't move away.

**Author's Note:**

> (sorry that this posted a fafillion times. and also I've made a fafillion minor edits since posting. it's that whole sloppy-perfectionist Pisces moon thing. fixed it. love youuuu.)
> 
> go sign up for [fight back fic auction.](www.fightbackfic.tumblr.com) (thanks functionalhuman!!)
> 
> title from Sarah Kay's poem [Montauk](https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=3oH8pYWY6dc).
> 
> "He was just exactly on my frequency... and I just thought that - oh, he understands it, we want the same things... It was that immediate though. It was really - it was a remarkable connection and very, very deeply felt, initially." -- [ a real actual thing Kail said about meeting Lin for the first time](http://stickmarionette.tumblr.com/post/150955613509/the-best-meet-cute-ever-or-tommy-kail-on-meeting), which is just worlds better than anything I could dream up.
> 
> you know where to find me.


End file.
